A flop and two successes

A few days ago I made beer bread and tried to make it a rye bread. It did not work out. The oven was too hot or the bread was in too long and I must have gotten some of the ingredients in the wrong ratio. The bread was bitter and seemed, to me, oddly salty. The crust reminded me a pretzel. Most got tossed. I can't even blame the Blatz for this one. I do plan to try making a rye beer bread again, and making some changes. A bit less rye flour, keeping an eye on the loaf in the oven, and backing off on the baking soda all seem like Good Ideas.

A day or so later I made "5 minute chocolate mug cake" with a couple changes from the last time. I mixed it in the 2 cup measure and microwaved in a small pyrex mixing bowl. I remembered the salt. I used Merry's Irish Cream rather than milk (the little "airline" sized bottle is the right measure). I added chocolate chips since I had them. Again, I cut the baking time 15 seconds short of the suggested 3 minutes. The result was good. It was not noticeably rubbery. It served two quite well. It's not truly a "5 minute" thing, but it is fairly quick and the result is good.

Today I tried something new and instead of chocolate chip cookies, started with a recipe for a chocolate cookie with chocolate chips and used cherry chips instead. All the things I managed to get wrong before I seem to have finally overcome. The results look like proper cookies (not spread oddly thin) and they don't wilt when I pick them up, but they are still reasonably soft.

What did I do this time? This paragraph is mainly a note to myself, but what I did was this. Following the linked recipe (omitting any nuts and substituting a 10 oz. package of cherry chips for chocolate chips), I sifted the flour, then after adding the other dry ingredients (except for the sugar) I sifted that mix, twice, to mix them. I used "air pan" cookie sheets with parchment paper. I baked only on the top oven rack for 8 minutes and at about the 4 minute mark, I turned the cookie sheet 180 degrees so the cookies would all get about the same heat (I had noticed some unevenness to the cookies in an earlier batch). Before I re-used the cookies sheets, I cooled them with cold water so the cookies always had a cold start.